Chrome: C or D?

conversely, here is what's missing from the cleopatra box set:

Alien Soundtracks
03 All Data Lost
04 SS Cygni
05 Nova Feedback
09 ST 37

Half Machine Lip Moves
11 Critical Mass

Read Only Memory (there is an 8 minute excerpt)
A1. You Can’t See Them - They Can’t Touch You
A2. Inacontact
A3. Read Only Memory
B1. In Front of the Crowd
B2. I am the Jaw

New Age 7"
A1. New Age

Red Exposure
02 Room 101
09 Nights Of The Earth

Blood on the Moon
02 Inner Vacume
04 Planet Strike
05 The Strangers
07 Out of Reach
09 Blood on the Moon

Chromosome Damage (Live in Bologna)
A1. [ La Gitana - Aleister Crowley * ]
A2. Perfumed Metal
A4. Insect Human (We are Connected)
B1. Sun Control
B4. Armageddon
B6. [ The Pentagram - Aleister Crowley * ]

No Humans Allowed
(same Read Only Memory tracks)
B1. You Can’t See Them- They Can’t Touch You
B2. Inacontact
B3. Read Only Memory
B4. In Front Of the Crowd
B5. I am the Jaw

3rd from the Sun
01 Fire Bomb
07 Shadows of a Thousand Years

(everything below is all chronicles material, renamed, repackaged, etc.)

Chronicles I
A1. Anorexic Sacrifice
A2. Tribes
B1. Wings Born in the Night

Chronicles II
A1. Beacons to the Eye
B1. Gehenna Lion (Gehenna to Cannaan)

Raining Milk
A3. Gehenna to Canaan
A4. Légendes des Fantomes Futures
B1. Beacons to The Eye
B2. Raining Milk
B3. Anorexic Sacrifice

Chronicles Vol 1 & 2
01 The Chronicles of the Sacrifice
02 The Chronicles of the Tribes
03 The Chronicles of the Open Door
04 The Chronicles of Born in the Night
05 The Chronicles of the Beacons
06 The Chronicles of Gehenna

at one time I had copies of the unedited tapes from their 1981 shows in bologna and SF. I should dig those out.

don't get too excited. the sound was pretty dodgy on them.

but hey, it's chrome.

If you've got dodgy copies, there are probably pristine masters out there somewhere. And, yes, I'd be excited to hear them regardless.

IIRC the sound wasn't dodgy because they were bad copies or nth generation, but because they were '81 amateur audience tapes of a noisy underground band. but they can't sound much worse than the live tracks on the cleopatra box set, which were mastered from a vinyl boot...

Should fit in really nicely between my Rallizes Denudes discs and the Black Metal collection, then!

Helios Creed is playing Friday night & i am so there.I've seen him multiple times including on the Nic Turner's Hawkwind tour.I kinda like the live Chrome stuff he plays that's on the second disc of some throwaway Cleopatra greatest hits.I used to have the original Chrome vinyl box but sold it years ago.Wish i hadn't.

When the hell is somebody gonna re-release The Visitation??

Yeah, this is the real question.
I really would like to put my dirty little hands on it.

Really not that great at all, IIRC, though I appreciate you've got to hear it once.

A friend of mine who played with Helios in Seattle just came back to Italy and gave me this Chrome dvd as a gift: it includes their vintage videos, including some hilarious clip with a raincoated Damon Edge proudly wielding a keytar. Great stuff!

looks like cleopatra is reissuing red exposure next month.

wish noiseville could've swung it.

yesssss

I know this is inconceivable, but hi dere Cleopatra plz include Read Only Memory as bonus trax.

at one time I had copies of the unedited tapes from their 1981 shows in bologna and SF.

A 1981 SF show from Mabuhay Gardens just popped up on D!me@d0zen -- sounds pretty good so far.

Yeah, saw that as well!

that sf show is the same one I leonardo'd last week... synchronicity or related phenomenon?

maybe I should throw the '81 italy show up on DAD

Mix CD Kings.

so Red Exposure is out, there is (was?) a ltd vinyl edition as well.

anybody heard this? I'd be interested in hearing how it sounds compared to the orig Siren/Beggar's Banquet vinyl.

Would love Red Exposure vinyl

yes but it is on CLEOPATRA who are notorious for doing shoddy jobs on releases, that's why I would like input from someone who has heard the new version...

I no. But the others sound pretty okay. Packaging is way worse than the pressing (surprisingly).

hmm I thought the others were on Noiseville? with the buttons and patches? I could be wrong. Those do sound great.

The vinyls are mysterious. Matrix #s look like they're from teh Siren pressings. Noiseville did the CDs, dunno who did the wax. Thought it was Cleo.

ahhh, thanks. that IS weird.

I saw the Cleopatra CDs of 'Red Exposure' & 'Retro Transmission' at Amoeba. Back covers on both looked so low effort, same cheap font just containing the titles, and the spines of both of them read 'Chrome - Retro Transmission' -- mr. Illustrator guy forgot to change the spine title before sending it off to the factory. Out of fear for how bad the rest of it would be, I ended up springing for that Harmonia Deluxe CD reissue on Lilith, with extra pictures / Tietchens liners / etc

Too bad Cleopatra did this one, 'Red Exposure' is their most accessible / catchiest (but still completely fucked) album, I hope the reissue occasions reviews at least

wait waht is Retro Transmission?

I'll still buy it if someone reps for the mastering

xpost 2002 Creed reformation album (had to google to find that out myself, the packaging says nothing) - never heard it, amazon reviewers say it's fair

ah, ok, thanks but I will probably pass. OTM about mastering being the key issue here.

red exposure sounds fine on cd. yeah, it looks like shit, but it sounds good to me - granted i haven't heard the original in a long time.

but it doesn't sounds like it comes off of a cassette or anything.

"Blood on the moon" is out (with sort of bonus tracks too).

The reissues sound okay.
As pointed out above, in pure Cleopatra style there are ridicolous mistakes here and there, but at least the albums are available.

am in the mood for chrome ...at the office. how long before management 'have a word' about the racket, do you think??

Listening to Half Machine Lip Moves tonight.

Also, many xposts & time gone by now, so here's the Eno cover "Here Come The Warm Jets" which is great.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SC55VD6U

Hey Chrome experts. I want to buy a copy of Half Machine Lip Moves since I love this album and I only have a CD-R some friend gave to me. But I was wondering what format and edition is the best purchase in terms of audio quality and presentation, the Noiseville CD or the Cleoplatra LP?

Hope that you can help me.

The two-fer with Half Machine Lip Moves + Alien Soundtracks released on Touch N Go has always done the trick for me...

The Noiseville reprints of Chrome are fine. I had a Cleopatra best of -- as well as the 'remake' of the Chrome box. Both were similarly fine. Six of one/half dozen of the other, depends on taste at the moment.

can't go wrong with the noiseville ones, at least they cared

Heads up:
just soze ye nose:
the Lilith records "Blood on the Moon" LP w/complementary CD version reissue is a shambles.
The packaging is sweet but when we get to what really matters it's cobbled together from (mostly)live versions of the BOTM tracks (from the "Live in Bologna" LP, I'm guessing) - the whole thing is presented as a verbatim reissue and isn't - which I'm guessing is why I was able to pick it up cheap - could be for some other entirely disconnected reason, though.
The live tracks just do not have that corkscrewing mania we need from chrome.
Lilith is a turd.

yeah they suck, fuck them and their overpriced bootlegs.

Wow, that's fucked up. Good to know.

Chrome with Helios Creed = Classic.
Damon Edge solo + non-Creed Chrome = Dud.

Classic understates how much I love Chrome, incidentally. Amazing band, one of my favorites.

Crome Box in black of night, by cathode ray light

Spent last night listening to a bunch of Chrome stuff cuz it'd been while. Still love Alien Soundtracks and most of Half Machine Lip Moves, but I'm on the fence about the rest. As a result, I was quite surprised to see the AMG ratings, which treat their albums with Helios Creed (even the semi-shitty odds 'n' sods comps) as more or less equivalent in quality.

Tastes differ and all, but it's hard not see a substantial drop in inspiration and invention from those first two albums with Creed to Red Medicine, which is texturally interesting but constrained and repetitive in comparison to the wild-ass space monster tape-splicing shit that made their reputation. The drop from there to Blood On the Moon is still more obviously catastrophic. It sounds like the work of the band that cut Red Medicine, but shorn of their experimental inclinations and given to a rather hokey theatricality. They keep recycling the same limp riffs and rhythms as though they were pop songs, and they just aren't. It's got moments, especially if you're into the sound, but they're occasional at at best and tend to drag on way too long.

The most offensive thing, to me, is that 3rd From the Sun, the band's sixth album (fifth with Creed), is held a notch above anything else they did. I'll happily grant that it's better than Blood On the Moon, but not by a massive margin, and I honestly can't understand why anyone would single it out as their finest hour, ranking it above even Alien Soundtracks. Shit is bananas.

Scored Correctly:

The Visitation (1976) - ★★½
Alien Soundtracks (1978) - ★★★★★
Half-Machine Lip Moves (1979) - ★★★★
Red Exposure (1980) - ★★½
Blood On the Moon (1981) - ★★
3rd From the Sun (1982) - ★★★

Okay, hold up. I'm being way too hard on Blood On the Moon. It's at least energetic, and the problem isn't that the riffs are "limp" (they're pretty great, actually), but that they're similar, and the tempos are similar, and there isn't really anything to the songs but the riffs. As a result, it gets tiresome fast. Taken in isolation, most of its tracks sound pretty damn good. 3rd From the Sun, otoh, sounds like a band running out of gas and not really caring.

So I guess I didn't score them "correctly" after all. Probably should have snatched a star back from 3rd From the Sun and given it to Blood On the Moon.

Anyway, it's weird how those three late albums each seem to isolate an aspect of the early Edge/Creed sound, reducing it to a recognizable style. Red Exposure concentrates on dystopian sci-fi soundscapes, Blood On the Moon pushes protopunk riff slinging, and 3rd From the Sun groans out the dirgey spacerock. Maybe what I miss is the unpredictable, irreducible manner in which Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves combine all those things.

The Visitation is weird. I'm new to it, having listened for the first time only last night, so I'm not yet sure what to think. It sounds like an embryonic hybrid of the harsh, blazed, sci-fi weirdness of Alien Soundtracks and some faceless West Coast psych band of the era. Which I suppose it is, but I think I like it. It's sort of the anti-Blood On the Moon, all loose, meandering and organic. Drags in the middle, but the opening and closing acts are pretty entertaining.

It was my first Chrome record, found an original with a lyric insert.
I'll always love it, but it is a different beast.

wow, shit, i've never even seen a copy

I like The Visitation. Production not fully crazed yet, but nowhere near normal, and some good songs. Sounds like a really bent early 70's southern / country hard rock band, way closer to James Gang than Hawkwind.

Read Only Memory is also up there with the best, but I don't know anyone who doesn't put AS/HMLM at the top, but I think Red Exposure has moments, they were obviously intentionally going for something more straightforward and better produced, which I always thought they completely nailed with their two pop songs for the Subterranean Modern compilation; clean but weird.

My offhanded what-do-I-know guess is that when they moved to (slightly) higher fidelity recording on the later records, they lost their workflow which allowed them to splice the flow of the album together out of fragments. AS/HMLM sound like they were painstakingly edited together & compositionally mastered at home on really cheap equipment; the later records ones have more low end, and sound professionally mastered in the studio, on the clock, but those 4-7 minute songs lack all those bizarre left-turn edits & details. But even reading your post slagging them off makes me want to go back and check them out again, there are moments.

As a result, I was quite surprised to see the AMG ratings

The reviewer might or might not have had final say on some of those ratings, I believe.

i dig the later edge/creed stuff, but I"m a sucker for their goofy psychedelic sci-fi doomsday cult sound. not as creative as alien soundtracks, etc., but it's an aesthetic not many have mastered ... or gone near ... or really exists outside of chrome. so it's like a nice little treat once in a while.